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Palestinian children are not just statistics

Siam Nuwara mourns over his son Nadim, shot in the chest by an Israeli sniper on 15 May.

Yotam RonenActiveStills

When the episode of celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain’s popular TV show Parts Unknownfilmed in occupied Palestine aired last September, I couldn’t bring myself to join in some of my friends’ effusive praise on Facebook and Twitter over its scenes of Palestinians preparing and enjoying traditional cuisine. And it wasn’t just because of my general aversion to all things celebrity.

The episode aired while I was working on a story about efforts to preserve rare footage recorded by the Palestine Liberation Organization’s film unit in Lebanon in the 1970s which documents the heyday of national organizing in the refugee camps.

I had a hard time reconciling that revolutionary moment during which Palestinians were producing the audiovisual representation of their own struggle with the excitement four decades later over an American TV show airing images of Palestinians doing wholly banal things like eating together as a family.

A very principled, brief speech made this week by Bourdain himself has now helped me understand why I was reluctant to join the showering of praise on the Palestine episode of his show.

“It’s a measure of how twisted and shallow our depiction of Palestinian people is that these images — showing regular people doing everyday things, cooking and enjoying meals, playing with their children, talking about their lives and hopes and dreams — come as a shock to so many. The world has visited many terrible things on the Palestinian people, none more shameful than robbing them of their basic humanity. People are not statistics. That is all we attempted to show, a small, pathetically small step toward understanding.

Bourdain hits the nail on the head: it’s incredibly sad that any popular culture representation of Palestinians as normal human beings is heralded as a great achievement, that the humanity of the Palestinian people has to be proven and affirmed, again and again.

Bourdain zeroes in on another point that cannot repeated enough: that people are not mere statistics.

This is what drives the work of publications like The Electronic Intifada, to insist that Palestinian lives cannot be reduced to dehumanizing, abstract numbers.

That the 5,000 Palestinian political prisoners held by Israel in an attempt to break the liberation movement have children who haven’t been hugged by their fathers or mothers who haven’t been kissed by their sons in years.

Nadim’s father Siam told Al-Jazeera English: “You can’t begin to imagine how it feels when you hold your son for the last time and put him in a grave,” adding, “We don’t raise our children to die. We raise them to live.”

So did the parents of Iman al-Hams, the 13-year-old girl killed when an Israeli army captain fired the entire magazine of his automatic rifle into her small body in southern Gaza in 2004. A year later, an Israeli military court acquitted the soldier who killed Iman of all charges.

The manner of Iman’s killing, and the revelation of a tape recording in which the captain is warned that she was just a child who was “scared to death,” made the shooting one of the most controversial since the Palestinian intifada erupted five years ago even though hundreds of other children have also died.

After the verdict, Iman’s father, Samir al-Hams, said the army never intended to hold the soldier accountable.

“They did not charge him with Iman’s murder, only with small offenses, and now they say he is innocent of those even though he shot my daughter so many times,” he said. “This was the cold-blooded murder of a girl. The soldier murdered her once and the court has murdered her again. What is the message? They are telling their soldiers to kill Palestinian children.”

Since Iman’s murder, hundreds more Palestinian children have been killed by Israeli forces in Gaza, and all doors to justice slammed in the faces of their surviving families.

In May 2012 an Israeli military court announced that no charges would be filed against the soldiers responsible for this atrocity. And always setting new standards for cruelty, Israel even refused the mother of one of the surviving children permission to travel with her daughter to Jerusalem for treatment for head injuries caused by shrapnel during the massacre.

Later that year, an Israeli soldier in the occupied West Bank city of Hebron shot dead Muhammad al-Salaymeh on his 17th birthday. The bullets that took al-Salaymeh’s young life were fired by Nofar Mizrahi, whose account that al-Salaymeh held a pistol to another soldier’s temple was proven to be a lie by surveillance video from the scene.

Mizrahi, who said that she felt no remorse for killing al-Salaymeh, going so far to say she was “happy” with the outcome, knows that there is no meaningful repercussion for slaying a Palestinian child and lying about the circumstances.

According to figures given by the Israeli legal advocacy group Yesh Din, only a scant number of Israeli military investigations into alleged offenses committed by Israeli soldiers against Palestinians result in charges; from 2005 to 2011, 94 percent of such investigations were closed without any indictments. And in those rare cases where there are convictions, punishments usually amount to a slap on the wrist.

Culture of impunity, culture of violence

Israel’s culture of impunity is enabled by the US, which shields the state from all means of accountability in the international arena while unconditionally giving the billions in military and financial aid that keeps the deadly occupation machinery oiled and running. And in Israel, not only do child-murdering soldiers go unpunished, but favorable attitudes towards violence against Palestinian children (as well as those towards other vulnerable populations under Israeli rule) are disturbingly mainstream.

This April, just days before Nadim Nuwara and Muhammad Abu al-Thahir were shot dead in cold blood, soldier David Adamov became an overnight hero among Israelis after he was caught on video cocking his loaded assault rifle at unarmed Palestinian youths in Hebron and threatening to shoot them in the head.

But this particular video struck a nerve among soldiers following rumors that Adamov was sentenced to twenty days in military jail for aiming his gun at civilians. The Israeli army quickly clarified that Adamov was being held for assaulting a superior officer for the second time. In fact, it was the Palestinian youth who was arrested and interrogated. But it was too late to stop the backlash.

Within hours a storm of outrage erupted within the Israeli army, culminating in the Facebook page “David from the Nahal brigade” — or “David Hanahlawi” in Hebrew. With more than 129,000 likes as of this writing plus thousands of photos of Israelis, mostly soldiers, holding up signs in Hebrew that say “We are with David Hanahlawi,” the page is still gaining traction.

After the video of Adamov went viral, the offices of Youth Against Settlements, the Palestinian group that recorded the footage, were repeatedly raided by the Israeli military. Twenty-year-old activist Saddam Abu Sneineh, who is seen being kicked by Adamov in the video, was arrested, beaten and tortured in revenge for the video. His mother and sisters were also subjected to abuse.

This is only one episode of many demonstrating a contempt for life resulting from the constant dehumanization of Palestinians under Israeli rule, a dehumanization necessitated when an entire population is seen through the scope of a rifle.

The slayings of Nadim Nuwara and Muhammad Abu al-Thahir are the direct consequnece of impunity for the deaths of Iman al-Hams, the Samouni family children and Muhammad al-Salaymeh, and thousands of other Palestinian boys and girls who have names, who had lives, and who had those lives stolen from them.

Those in the Israeli military responsible for these children’s deaths — and the civilians in the Israeli government who design the policies of the settler-colony state enforced by the army — have names, too.

Our obligation toward upholding the humanity of these children is to keep building the pressure so there is a cost for their crimes. So that one day the names of these precious children and their killers will be read not in an Israeli military court or in public relations battles fought over “Israel’s image,” but in a real court of justice.

Comments

Does she not see her own arrogance; Bourdain's work is dismissed until the precise moment he says what matches the author's position. As if his TV show was made without any self-consciousness because he is a celebrity (which our tolerant author professes an aversion to.) Still, the author acts as if Bourdain's scales dropped from his eyes, rather than from her own.

Some growing up needs to be done. The Palestinian cause is not a single individual's exclusive property; this article reminds me of those who complain loudly when Palestinians are ignored and shriek even louder when they do receive coverage, preferring to be purists rather than find anything positive.

BRAVO! BRAVO! BRAVO! for having the courage to tell it like it is. We, in this country, are cumulatively guilty for aiding and abetting (with our tax dollars) these killings, unwarranted and inexcusable as they are. We are only too ready to point a finger at other countries, but when it comes to Israel, we not only are silent, we encourage these acts by our support. Our morality is in question here. Israel's morality is in even more in question. It is to be deplored. The sooner we pull out our aid to Israel, the better for us AND for Israel - not to mention the Palestinians!! It would be a good thing to allocate a section of the Apartheid Wall in Israel for the recording of all the Palestinians who have died at the hands of the Zionist Israelis. Thank you, Maureen, for exposing these atrocities by the "most moral army in the world".